As significant proliferation of personal computers (PC) proceeds, a digital still camera (hereinafter, a “digital camera”) for providing pictures to be displayed in the PC has been also widely diffused in recent years. Using the PC and the digital camera increases works of selecting some pictures to be printed from the pictures loaded into the PC from the digital camera, and of selecting some pictures which match the image from the loaded pictures to make a scrapbook. A user selects the picture from an index of the pictures displayed in a video monitor with a cursor stopping at the desired image after moving along the pictures one by one from the first picture. Therefore, even if it is known that the desired picture is in the last, the user needs to move the cursor along the pictures one by one to the last, which takes a lot of time to select the picture.
To solve the above problem, Japanese patent publication laid-open No. H10(1998)-126724 discloses functions of displaying plural thumbnail pictures in predetermined arrangement imported from a digital camera to a video monitor, showing a cursor in a freely movable way on a screen of the video monitor, acquiring its position (coordinate), considering a picture on which the cursor is placed as a printing output picture candidate, fetching a picture of high resolution corresponding to the selected thumbnail picture from the digital camera to a memory when confirmation is inputted, showing the picture on the video monitor, and adding an index to the displayed picture.
The picture selecting process disclosed in the '724 publication is the process in which the plural pictures loaded to the memory are displayed as an m x n array in a predetermined size on a displaying device, and the picture on which the cursor is placed is considered as the printing output picture candidate. Thus, the process still has the problem that it takes much time to select the pictures. Even when it is intended to select the picture of the bright and intense yellow image, it is not clear whether the picture has the brightest and the most intense image among the plural pictures loaded to the memory.